YouTube now warns that the German National Anthem is offensive ‘for some groups’

YouTube has taken a very curious decision and marked the traditional German National Anthem as inappropriate or offensive.

The clip has almost 3 million views and includes all three verses of the anthem. Nowadays only the third verse is sung.

Some people wrongly believe it is the Nazi version, as Chris Fox a BBC reporter did. The anthem predates the Nazis and they only sang the first verse followed by the Horst-Wessel-Song. The melody was first written in 1796/97. The verses of the poem were written in 1841.

The Horst-Wessel-Song almost became a sort of second anthem during the Nazi era. The first two verses of the anthem are also not banned as is often incorrectly stated but it is frowned upon to sing them.

Chris Fox later replied that he knew all along that the anthem predates the Nazis and that it wasn’t used by them and he only meant to say it was not the current version. An odd claim after his initial assertions, of course, but he works for the BBC after all.

YouTube is not the only social media platform to take censorship to this bizarre level. Facebook censored the Venus figure as pornographic content and later apologised for it. Twitter shadow banned 600,000 accounts for the wrong opinions.

So do Facebook and YouTube, of course, with demonetisation and bans. Alex Jones was banned by all of them, for example.

Are we going to mark all of Wagner’s compositions as offensive because Hitler revered his work next? Or perhaps even the German language?

It is sheer lunacy and an attempt at pleasing a minority of people, who would be offended by their own shadow if somebody could only offer them a reason.